In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.

The Higgs boson has been spotted bottoming out — but that’s a good thing.

Physicists have detected the elementary particle decaying into two bottom quarks, exotic, short-lived particles that often appear in the aftermath of high-energy particle collisions. The elusive process was finally observed six years after the Higgs boson’s initial discovery, by physicists working at the Large...

When researchers operating the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, outside Geneva discovered the Higgs boson, it ended a decades-long effort to fill the final gap in physicists’ catalog of matter’s particles and forces. Now comes the hard part. Physicists know that their catalog is only a start; there’s far more to the universe that needs to be explained. But the LHC’s first round of results...

A fresh analysis of data from the particle collider that delivered the Higgs boson has dashed physicists’ sliver of hope that another new particle had emerged from the subatomic shrapnel.

“We’ve learned that there’s no obvious Godzilla particle hiding with the Higgs,” says Tim Tait, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Irvine. “Now we’re going to have to look for more...

On July 4, 2012, Gerald Guralnik was in a packed room at CERN savoring the discovery of the Higgs boson, which confirmed a theory he proposed nearly 50 years ago.

No such celebration occurred Oct. 8. Guralnik was home when he learned online that physicists François Englert and Peter Higgs had won the Nobel Prize in physics for formulating the same theory. “I’m happy for Englert and...

The prediction of the mass-bestowing Higgs field and the famous particle that goes with it has won the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics.

The Nobel committee selected Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and François Englert of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, who in 1964 separately proposed the existence of a field that permeates the cosmos and gives...

The 1964 prediction of the Higgs boson, which was finally confirmed last year, has won the Nobel Prize in physics.

By identifying the Higgs particle, physicists confirmed the existence of a field that permeates the cosmos and gives mass to certain elementary particles that make up stars, planets and people. The discovery also completed the standard model, which describes the universe's...

Higgs particles may get an upgrade from by-product to big player in the explanation of how the universe ended up with more matter than antimatter. They could also explain one possible way dark matter was made.

New calculations suggest that if an early-universe imbalance existed between the Higgs boson and its antiparticle, then the resulting physical processes could account for how the...

At 5 a.m. last Fourth of July, Flip Tanedo rolled out of bed after an hour of repeatedly smacking his alarm clock’s snooze button. Rousting himself at dawn would be worth it, he hoped, because what he was about to hear was likely to have a huge bearing on the course of his career.

2012 SCIENCE NEWS TOP 25: 1 It’s hard enough to muster a standing-room-only crowd for a physics talk, let alone an overnight queue. But on the night of July 3, scientists sacrificed sleep to line up outside the main auditorium at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva. Their goal: get a seat to hear Joe Incandela. It wasn’t the laconic, gray-suited scientist they had lined up for,...

You know that a scientific idea has penetrated popular culture when people start making jokes about it. Like the one about the priest who changed his name to Higgs so he could be better at giving mass. Or some that say a gadget for negating the Higgs field would be a weapon of mass destruction. Most are variants on a Higgs boson walks into a bar … finally.